Puro Politics is a weekly podcast hosted by columnist Gilbert Garcia, covering the drama and nuance of local government issues.
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Charlotte Williamson Eisenhauer’s desire to get along with every faction of the party she is seeking to lead might be the most controversial part of her campaign for Bexar County Republican chair.
Eisenhauer, a St. Mary’s University School of Law graduate who has worked in her family’s oil-and-gas business and ran for state representative in 2018, wants to pull together the feuding wings of the local GOP.
Keep in mind that the Bexar County Republican Party voted in 2017 to censure then-Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who was San Antonio’s most prominent Republican elected official at the time.
Over the past two years, the party has become further divided under the erratic leadership of Cynthia Brehm, the party chair who threatened to pull out of the county’s joint primary election and recently engaged in a very public altercation with GOP activist Monica Rojas Stone.
Eisenhauer’s concerns about the fracturing of the party compelled her last summer to launch a campaign for party chair, even as she was on the verge of giving birth to her first child, a girl who is now 3 months old.
On ExpressNews.com: Brehm faces primary challenger for GOP chair
“This didn’t just start with Cynthia. This has been going on a long time,” Eisenhauer said during an interview on this week’s edition of the Express-News’ Puro Politics podcast. “There’s been a division in the party that I didn’t even know, really. I was aware of it before I ran for office, but then when I ran for office, I really sort of saw the level of animosity that there was.”
Along those lines, Eisenhauer has heard complaints from some party activists resistant to her unity message.
“When I first started giving speeches, when I was 9 months pregnant, it was interesting. It was ‘unity, unity, unity,’” Eisenhauer said.
“And a certain activist who I will not name texted me and said, ‘I heard that you led with this unity crap speech.’ By far and away, when people criticize my speeches, they say, ‘Could you just leave out the unity?’”
At one meeting with a local Republican club, Eisenhauer described herself as the only one of the four candidates in the primary race who has spoken to all the various GOP clubs.
“And the thing that they held against me the most was, ‘I thought you just went to our club. What do you mean? You go to all of them?’ So, they were a little hurt that I was getting along with everybody when they thought I was only speaking to them.”
Hear these and other issues discussed on this week’s edition of the Puro Politics podcast.
Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
